Lydia Madintin Konlan

Six rural communities. Six hundred rural women trained. One hundred and fifty of them now running their own mushroom farms, many earning independently for the first time in their lives. For a business that had four employees before winning the WAYA award, the six-month numbers from Rising SheFarms Food told a story that was harder to predict than it was to admire.

Lydia Madintin Konlan had built her enterprise in Tamale, in Ghana’s Northern Region, around a crop that is still largely unfamiliar in the communities where she works. Mushrooms are not a traditional staple in the region’s agricultural imagination, which meant that every farm Lydia established was also an act of persuasion, of women, of families, of community elders and chiefs who needed to see the economics before they believed in them. That she had managed to move from four communities to six, and to bring 150 women to the point of productive, income-generating farms within six months of winning, said something about both the model and the woman running it.

The prize money went directly into organizational capacity: a project manager and an administrative officer, both young women, were hired to help Lydia manage a network that was growing faster than a two-person operation could sustain. Tools and composting equipment followed. The investment was quiet but structural, the kind that does not generate headlines but makes everything else possible.

The innovation that perhaps best captured Rising SheFarms’ approach was the conversion of 10 tonnes of agricultural waste into 10,000 compost bags. It was a circular economy solution that reduced the cost of production, cut dependence on commercial inputs, and turned a disposal problem into a supply chain asset, all at once. Combined with a partnership with the Association of Nubian Vaults to develop eco-friendly mushroom growing structures, and a traceability system tracking product from farm to market, the business was building climate-smart credentials into its operational DNA rather than treating them as an add-on.

Financially, the award had unlocked further momentum. USD 12,000 in seed funding came through the Global Accelerator Program run by the Accelerator Centre and the University of Waterloo, which Lydia had joined following the recognition. Revenue from fresh mushroom sales had grown by 10%, underpinned by the expanding network of community-based women producers. A pilot automated growing chamber was in development, with four acres of land already secured, a move toward year-round production that would address one of the most persistent vulnerabilities in fresh produce agribusiness: seasonality.

The peer-mentorship model Lydia had introduced, where women who adopted the technology early turned around and trained those coming behind them, was doing something that external programs rarely achieve: embedding knowledge in the community itself rather than making it dependent on continued outside support. Chiefs and elders had been brought into the process deliberately, their endorsement helping to shift the social calculus in communities where a woman earning her own income from farming was still a new idea.

Six months on from placing as 2nd Runners Up, Lydia was running a business that was less about mushrooms than it was about what mushrooms could unlock, income, independence, and a foothold in the formal economy for rural women who had largely been left outside it.